Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
as individual entities, but as nodes within a larger metropolitan region connected by
rapid transport systems, something that was soon forgotten in the garden suburbs
that claimed to mimic his ideas (Davies and Herbert
1993
, Chap. 8). Yet despite the
growth of regional associations in many parts of the world to promote these ideas,
most were more effective in conceptual terms (Hall
1988
), and only a few led to
new structures of governance based on regions. From the 1950s, however, concern
about the spatial economic inequalities between regions within states led to a re-
vival of regional ideas at the sub-national not city-regional scale, with concerted
efforts in many countries to remove these differences by regional planning. In ad-
dition, geographers in particular used increasingly sophisticated multivariate tech-
niques to define the spatial spread of the emerging city-regions, defined as the func-
tional influence of urban areas over their surrounding regions based on shopping
or daily commuting flows (Davies
1984
). These city regions are not homogeneous
regions because of some continuous urban sprawl due to the outward spread of one
large city, or the coalescence of what several formerly freestanding entities, what
Geddes (
1915
) called 'conurbations'. Instead, they were composed of a central city
surrounded by a scattered series of satellite towns, out-of-town shopping centres,
industrial zones and other urban-related activities in an otherwise rural landscape.
These units had coherence because they were the basic functional regions of various
central cities, or cities in the case of more complex urbanized areas, although other
flows, such as business or trade connections, provide other types of hinterlands.
Although the Charter for the New Urbanism describes these areas as 'metropolitan'
regions, there is no standard definition of what a metropolis is; census bodies in
different countries use figures from 50,000 to a million population as the threshold
value for the central city, although the surrounding functional region, its city-region,
is usually defined by some level of daily commuting flows. These metropolitan or
city-regions owe their homogeneity to their regular functional connections with the
central city, so they cannot be viewed as 'finite regions', presumably defined by
landscape features, as described in the first principle of the NU Charter, although
if physical features impede interaction patterns they may occasionally form a rigid
boundary. Instead the boundaries of city-regions are 'zones in transition'; functional
regions have fuzzy edges. This causes problems when attempts are made to spa-
tially define the boundaries for administrative purposes, since political boundaries
have to be precise, not transitional zones, to ensure that the government units have
control over a defined area. Most city-regions that are defined as new government
entities usually just group together pre-existing local government units, which ei-
ther over or under-bound the functional region and only have an approximate rela-
tionship with the functional city-region, which does present problems in coherent
governance.
The impetus for a new governance in city-regions came from the recognition that
planning in these regions could not be carried out effectively because administra-
tive units had only powers over their own areas and had no ability to influence what
went on in neighbouring jurisdictions. They were considered too small and power-
less in a legal sense to solve many emerging city-region problems, of which six in
particular had the most influence.
